You know? Once upon a time i've done some freelance sysadmin for small businesses. So i installed a new fileserver and a networking gateway with least-cost router functionality for the phones, somewhere. When ready i asked what that big tower did, that stood aside unplugged. 'Nothing, that is just trash we haven't discarded yet.' Since the case had a nice design it seemed wasteful to me, and i took it back home. At home i plugged it into to some spare screen, and since it had a networking card into that also. When ready i rocked the big red switch it had with a satisfying clack into the upwards posistion and wanted to do something else at my other systems while it booted up (i thought). So i rolled, sitting on my chair, maybe 3 feet, and then heard a loud 'Ta-Daa!'. I looked sideways and barely saw how Word 6 and Excel 5 popped up, out of the corner of my eyes. I was dumbstruck!

I shut it down and repeated that, looking at my wristwratch.

FOUR SECONDS!

I couldn't believe that and tested maybe five times again. It took never more than 4 seconds from rocking the switch to WfW 3.11 Desktop with Word 6 and Excel 5 in autostart ready to use! It even got a DHCP address while being at it.

The thing is, at that time i had some Sun SparcStations, some HP PA-Risc Workstations, and assorted X86 PCs, one of them an AMD Athlon XP PR1800 overclcocked to PR2100 with 1.5 GB virtual channel memory SD-Ram, running NetBSD (because it just worked, don't ask). I felt very ahead of 'the curve'.

And then this trash came along and burst my bubble...

I sat there and only thought: 'what for?!'

Now some old Windows running atop of DOS isn't something to really envy, but in this combination of components, BIOS, drivers it got the job done without any hassle, FAST!

That was eye opening for me.

Ever tried installing freeDOS on your computer?

The Commodore 64 boots up in ~2 seconds.